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No amount of numbers in the NBA is ever enough: NBA Insider

BOBCOUSY.JPG

Thanks to the NBA's vast statistical offerings, we can know in an instant that Bob Cousy (right) scored 22 points for Boston in this March 16, 1954 game against the New York Knicks.
(AP photo/Matty Zimmerman)

CLEVELAND, Ohio – If you want to refresh your memory on how
many points Bob Cousy scored in the Boston Celtics game against the St. Louis
Hawks on Dec. 15, 1956, the answer (26, by the way) is a click away.

If you want to know who is the best catch-and-shoot player
in the NBA right now, that's easy to quantify and label, too. (That's Golden
State's Klay Thompson, who scores an average of 10.4 points per game on
catch-and-shoot opportunities.)

And if the Cavaliers want to know which player scores the
most from the left side of the court during practice, they can have that
information instantaneously, too. (Though it's classified, and not something they are willing to share with the public, or the rest of the NBA.)

It's a new statistics-based NBA world we're living in, and
the league has done all that it can to embrace it with upgraded information
available to everyone on www.nba.com/stats.
The Cavaliers, too, constantly are looking for any statistical edge possible, a
pursuit that has led to a partnership agreement with Krossover, a sports film
analysis and statistics company, to analyze practice film.

The NBA's statistical offerings began in February, when they
unveiled their new stats Website, powered by SAP. The site began offering every
NBA box score from the inaugural 1946-47 season, advanced shooting charts, top
lineup combinations, and in-depth statistical breakdowns that includes such
options as per-possession breakdowns, "clutch," and efficiency.

It is, frankly, overwhelming at times. Simply finding a
player such as Kyrie Irving's career scoring average is more difficult than
seeing a breakdown of his shot chart (and that he shoots better from the left
side of the court).

But the most interesting part the NBA added to its online
offerings this fall came through its partnership with STATS and SportsVU, a
system that nearly every league team already had, individually.

With SportsVU, six cameras are installed in various angles
around the court, recording images 25 times per second. Somehow, with all that
data, obscure statistics can be compiled: a player's speed, rebounding chances,
how many times a player drives to the basket, how many pull-up shots he takes.

"We
are a league driven by data, and our expanded partnership with STATS provides
our teams and fans with access to uncover groundbreaking statistics," said
Steve Hellmuth, NBA Executive Vice President of Operations and Technology, in a
news release. "In this new era of statistical information, SportVU will be an
invaluable resource for basketball executives and our passionate fans."

For the Cavaliers' part, they've upped the ante by
incorporating Krossover into their vast compilation of statistics. With the
software, players and executives can access statistics and film from practices.

The Cavaliers also are using Krossover to record data and
film from college games, something that will be invaluable during the draft.

Krossover CEO and founder Vasu Kulkarni originally developed
the software with the intention of marketing it toward analyzing statistics at
lower levels such as high school, but college and professional sports have
found a need for it, as well.

"There's nothing different that we're doing, realistically,
as you compare it to what Synergy has done for years as well as what the SportsVU
cameras can do automatically," Kulkarni said. "The difference is we're doing it
for the lower levels in sports. But in doing so, we built a very very, very
unique system that there's just no one else that does this where the front
office, the ownership, the coach, the player can log in and find what they're
looking for. ... It's so easy. We didn't have to train anyone on the Cavs side to
learn how to use this product."

Simplicity in the world of statistics? That might be the
most innovate part, yet.

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